Rosie's Voice Just Kept Getting Better

July 7, 2002|By Matt Schudel Arts Writer

For years, I kept her voice on my answering machine.

"Hi, Matt," she said, "this is Rosemary Clooney."

I had interviewed her before she came to Fort Lauderdale to perform in the spring of 1996, and, unlike most people of her stature, she actually called to say thanks. Her voice was just like her singing: warm, brisk and unforgettable.

For a few years in the 1950s, Rosemary Clooney was the most popular female singer in the world. Married to an Oscar-winning actor, she was an authentic Hollywood glamour queen. In 1953, she was the first female singer to appear on the cover of Time magazine, then she starred in White Christmas, the hit movie of 1954. She had her own television show and was bigger than her nephew, George Clooney, is today.

By 1996, though, all that early fame was long vanished. The bottom had fallen out so many times that she had to rebuild not just her career, but her entire life. She used a remarkable resilience to enrich her art, and that's why her death on June 29 at age 74 is so hard to take.

I'm not at all sure people realize what a treasure has been lost. Rosie wasn't just some star of the past who had faded from out of the sky. She never became a nostalgia act. Over the past quarter century she made 25 albums for Concord Records, a small jazz label in California, that are a living textbook of how the Great American Songbook -- the music of Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins -- ought to be sung.

Back when she was a blue-eyed ingenue with her early hits Come On-A My House, Mambo Italiano and Hey There, she was a good singer. But she was much better at 65 than she was at 25. It wasn't until she learned to like that warmhearted overweight woman who looked back from the mirror that Rosie made herself into one of the truly great singers of our time.

She was born into a troubled family in Maysville, Ky., near Cincinnati, and began singing on the radio with her younger sister when she was 16. A year later, they were on the road with the Tony Pastor band, making Clooney one of the last important singers to come up with the big bands of the 1940s. The road turned out to be a better place than home, with an alcoholic father and a mother who ran off to California to marry a sailor.

Rosie couldn't read music and never had a voice lesson in her life, but her big-band years gave her an unerring intonation and a solid sense of time. She admired Billie Holiday, and even chose Billie as the godmother of one of her daughters. But the singer she modeled herself after was Frank Sinatra, emulating his precise diction and his way of finishing a word, pronouncing every syllable and final consonant.

Rosie had five children in five years with her husband, the chronically unfaithful Jose Ferrer, whom she married and divorced two times. She had an affair with the music arranger Nelson Riddle that both called the grand passion of their lives, but Riddle stayed with his own wife and six children, and Clooney turned more and more to pills and booze. In June 1968 she was standing a few feet from Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A month later, after driving down a mountain road in the wrong lane, she was locked in a psychiatric ward.

Finally, she realized that one thing she still had in her life was her music. It seemed prophetic that for years she had lived in the same Beverly Hills house that George Gershwin lived in during the 1930s. Ira Gershwin was her next-door neighbor.

As she began working in half-empty lounges of suburban motels, her voice came back richer and fuller than ever. (I sometimes wonder how much of her husky, burnished tone came from the cigarettes that she smoked for half a century and that ultimately caused her death from lung cancer.) Somehow, she found a way to put all those years of pain and struggle into her songs.

"Every experience changes your approach to a song," she told me in 1996. "All the songs I sing, I sing through the sensibility of a 68-year-old woman."

Her singing was simple, direct and unadorned, with a sincerity that could not be faked. She sang with common sense. Director Mike Nichols once said, "She sings like Spencer Tracy acts."

When you didn't expect it, Rosie could make you weep or suddenly catch your breath. She recorded Sophisticated Lady with Duke Ellington in 1956, but it's her mature 1994 recording that pulls at your heart. Her phrasing is easy and conversational as she reaches the line, "Diamonds shining, dancing, dining with some man in a restaurant/Is that all you really want?"

Then, after a slight pause, she says, in a chilling, spoken tone, "No."

You can listen over and over and never be prepared for the depth of feeling she places in that one quiet syllable. It may sound easy, but she only knew how hard it was to distill all she had learned in life and music into a single word. There, in that phrase, with its perfect timing and a lifetime's understanding behind it, is the eternal art of Rosemary Clooney.

Matt Schudel can be reached at mschudel@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4689.